Modern networking continues to provide an improvement in communication and information access. As an example, in-house data centers, associated with a particular entity of interrelated group of users, could contain a large number of information technology (IT) resources that are interconnected through a network. These networks are configured in different ways depending on implementation-specific details such as the hardware used and the physical location of the equipment, and depending on the particular objectives of the network. One common type of network configuration is a local area network (LAN). In actual practice, a typical LAN will include large numbers of computer systems, switches, routers, load balancers, firewalls, and the like.
In one embodiment, a LAN is established and/or managed by having a technician physically connecting devices according to a network plan. That is, when a plurality of resources is to be used in a network, the technician will connect the devices physically and install the correct software into the devices by hand. Each time a modification to the network or software is necessary, the technicians must manually connect or disconnect the devices or manually install or change the software to perform the modification.
To resolve the manual modification process, many modern networks also have in-house data centers which include technicians working from a network operation center (NOC). The technicians issue commands to control the deployment of servers and to control the supporting infrastructures, such as disk logical units (LUNs) in a disk array, network switches in the LAN, and the like. For example, a technician in the NOC may organize a virtual LAN (VLAN) including a plurality of the resources within the LAN network. In general, the network is referred to as a VLAN because the actual network (e.g., the wiring, cables, etc.) is not reconfigured, instead, the technicians in the NOC will virtually assign (e.g., with the use of software) the components specific to the VLAN. Thus, the physical network remains the same, but the actual utilization of the network can be divided into distinct LANs virtually.
In present VLAN environments, like most other complex IT environments, security is paramount for the VLAN. Therefore, the access to the VLAN is extremely limited. In other words, while a plurality of servers and other provisionable resources are utilized within the VLAN, only the management server can provide any services to the resources within the VLAN. For example, for a server to utilize an application or a service within the VLAN, the management server must provide the service. Moreover, if the management server provides the service to one resource within the VLAN, every resource within the VLAN is provided access to the service and charged accordingly. Regardless of whether or not the resource used the provided service.
In addition to providing the service to every resource within the VLAN regardless of utilization, present IT environments also require the provided services to be established during the actual “wiring” or construction of the network. That is, the services utilize a specialized network interface card (NIC) which is pre-wired to a central top tier switch such that when the service is required to be used by a specific provisioned resource, the specialized NIC can dynamically join the VLAN within which the specific provisioned resource resides. Limitations to the server providing the service are also constrained by the number of IP addresses that the specialized NIC can manage.
In other words, not only is the service provided by a server/switch port specific physical wiring customization, but also none of the provisioned resources within the VLAN (or other resources outside of the VLAN) is allowed to provide services to any of the other resources within the VLAN. Therefore, even if a VLAN user has a server with a desired service thereon, the user is not capable of sharing the service even with other resources within the VLAN controlled by the same user. This limitation is extremely deleterious during operations wherein the VLAN would benefit from having a resource within or outside of the network acting as a backup or high availability (HA) resource for seamless operation during failure of a critical resource within the VLAN fabric.